Homeless, Unemployed, and Surviving on Bitcoins
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Re: Homeless, Unemployed, and Surviving on Bitcoins
#2Seems like you could make more than .60 a day doing Mechanical Turk jobs. It'd be a little less mind numbing than watching commercials every day.
Re: Homeless, Unemployed, and Surviving on Bitcoins
#3there should be a service that combines amazon turk with bitcoins.
Re: Homeless, Unemployed, and Surviving on Bitcoins
#4Seems like you could make more than .60 a day doing Mechanical Turk jobs. It'd be a little less mind numbing than watching commercials every day.
I agree you can make more. But, one thing to consider is, you have to have a bank account to deposit turk money into or buy things from Amazon. Neither of those has the immediacy of Bitcoin.
Also, a lot of homeless have issues getting a bank account. We have millions of "unbanked" people in the US alone.
Re: Homeless, Unemployed, and Surviving on Bitcoins
#5> He doesn’t have to worry as much about getting robbed.
Er, laptop?
Re: Homeless, Unemployed, and Surviving on Bitcoins
#6The math doesn't add up.
At "0.000133 bitcoins a day" it would take 7518 days (more than 20 years) to make one bitcoin.
At "0.0004 bitcoins" per video it would take 2500 videos to watch to make one bitcoin.
The amount of wasted human capital is insane. Why don't these people get jobs? There are tons of posts on Craigslist for jobs that don't require any education - delivery, waiters, busboys, cleaning, etc.
Re: Homeless, Unemployed, and Surviving on Bitcoins
#7Seems like you could make more than .60 a day doing Mechanical Turk jobs. It'd be a little less mind numbing than watching commercials every day.
watching commercials every day
I don't think the YouTube clips that he watches are commercials. From TFA:
thanks to a service, called BitcoinGet, that shamelessly drives artificial traffic to certain online clips
Seems more like aspiring YouTube stars paying for traffic to their videos so that they rank higher on YouTube's site.
The other app he uses - Bitcoin Tapper - does seem like straight up being paid to click on ads though.
Re: Homeless, Unemployed, and Surviving on Bitcoins
#8The math doesn't add up. At "0.000133 bitcoins a day" it would take 7518 days (more than 20 years) to make one bitcoin. At "0.0004 bitcoins" per video it would take 2500 videos to watch to make one bitcoin. The amount of wasted human capital is insane. Why don't these people get jobs? There are tons of posts on Craigslist for jobs that don't require any education - delivery, waiters, busboys, cleaning, etc.
Why don't these people get jobs?
You're asking a rational question of irrational people. When someone has a fundamental problem - depression, addiction, anxiety, etc. they often don't make rational decisions.
Re: Homeless, Unemployed, and Surviving on Bitcoins
#9Some of the comments on that article are surprisingly nasty
Re: Homeless, Unemployed, and Surviving on Bitcoins
#10It seems to me that it is not a property of bitcoin or cryptocurrency itself that is allowing these folks to supplement their income with "manual" labor. Instead it feels like the fact that it's a new, relatively unexploited market that is enabling these ventures to scrape together the people and resources necessary by using extremely thin margins. I can't imagine this will be viable for long as more people get into it.
Sure, you can provide clicks in exchange for bitcoin, and that might help some homeless people right now. But what happens when that becomes over-saturated and/or youtube et. al. get better at preventing that? Amazon Turk + BTC could be viable.
> This is the only property for which Dale is currently accepting digital currency, but so far, he says, “it’s been a good experience because bitcoins have gone up in value, so it’s more than I would have gotten in regular dollars.”
I bet he won't be so happy when the price swings in the other direction. Therein lies the eternal problem with BTC for trade on a scale even beginning to approach that of what goes on in the world today.